Sputterpub's Blog

We drove home with unopened champagne and leftover snacks. I took a bag of chocolate raisins but otherwise managed to leave the junk in the car. Corky and I resettled rather happily in our house.

Until the next day. I woke up and couldn’t walk. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. My left foot, back above my heel, just wouldn’t flex the way walking requires. I’d already arranged to take that day off from work; I kept hobbling around my house denying that I had a problem. It just didn’t make sense. I tried aspirin, I tried ibuprofen: no relief. I rubbed. I raised. I iced. There was a little easing of the immobility that afternoon, but still my left foot didn’t work right.

The day after that I had some mobility. But I was stiff, especially when I first started to move after sitting. And a lump had developed just above the creases between the back of my heel and my ankle.

After a week of lumpy stiffness I went to the orthopedic doctor. He told me I had Achilles’ tendinitis. I asked him how it happened and he shrugged. All I can figure is I strained it somehow climbing around with Sam. The doctor said pain pills wouldn’t work because the last place our circulatory system sends stuff is down to the feet. He told me the best I could do was ice the area frequently to promote circulation there and speed healing, to rest the injury, and to learn how to stretch the tendon. He told me not to wear heels any more but I’d given them up years ago. And he gave me the discouraging news that tendinitis takes a long time to heal.

He was right. Heel-healing is a process. It must have been six weeks before the stiffness went away and over a year before the lump diminished.

But I derived some benefits from the experience. It didn’t hurt to learn a new stretch. I no longer take ankle strength for granted. I met and fell for Rick.

He was in the waiting room when I went for my follow-up visit with the doctor. He wore a cast on his right leg and had to move his crutches to permit me to sit in the one empty chair. We got to talking.

He’s tall and gorgeous and ten years younger than I am. I never would have considered myself eligible for a guy like him. To which he said: “Hah!”

He broke his ankle in a bad landing after his third skydive. But it healed stronger than before the break, and he still jumps. We’ve been a couple for over a year and a half now and he has introduced me to more active habits. I won’t jump out of a plane but we take bicycle trips. We hike a lot. We river raft. I seem to be reverse aging.

Not so Beth. My poor ex-friend sister-in-law has only grown fatter and more murky. She didn’t make that trip to Hawaii. She seldom leaves her house except to go to work. My brother, who is the most loyal spouse I’ve ever known, is starting to grow discontent. But lately I’m a little hopeful about her. Two weeks ago she twisted her ankle. With her weight, it turned out to be a bad sprain. She’ll be on crutches for six weeks. She’s starting to understand what a drag it is to have a mobility problem. She’s doing the prescribed exercises. And it appears that she is eating less.

Beth and Sam are joining Rick and me for dinner this Saturday. They’ve agreed to try my current favorite restaurant, where all the food is fresh and clean and it’s easy to dine well and still feel well. And Sunday, this Sunday, Rick and I plan to go ice skating.

Hah!

So Beth must have refused half a dozen of Sam’s travel ideas before the Mendocino plan. Suddenly she agreed. Sam arranged for two rooms at a dog-friendly inn and a vehicle big enough for the six of us, and we set off at a comfortable hour on a Friday morning in May.

The ride went pretty well. Corky puked once when the road started winding, but I was prepared for that and caught the mess in paper towels. All three dogs are females, and Corky had to contest for status with Raquel, Sam’s and Beth’s oldest, but we managed then and throughout the trip to place easy-going Baby as a buffer between our feisty bitches; the canine pack settled rather gracefully.

The primate pack dynamic wasn’t quite as smooth. I tend to be direct and talkative. Beth is the most passive/aggressive person I’ve ever known. We never argued but we also never eased into the comfortable companionship that we used to enjoy and that Sam so wanted to see.

That’s not to say we didn’t have a good time. At least I did, and I believe Sam when he says he did too. There’s no assessing Beth. Not only will she lie to us, but she is forever flipping in her heart between resenting her loved ones and nurturing her enemies; the woman is more ambivalent than a parent.

We walked on the headlands with the dogs. We lunched on café porches, with the dogs. We hung around our cabin-like rooms, drinking the champagne we bought on the way there and watching the dogs romp. Sometimes we left the dogs in the car and went into a restaurant, but mostly we cooked junk food in our kitchenettes, munched junk food on our couches, chowed down on junk food while lolling on our porches. Sam and Beth share a binge eating disorder, and I’ve visited there enough myself that I could get back into it for the weekend. We’d driven to the Fort Bragg Safeway even before we checked in, and we had stocked up on every kind of treat that appealed to any of us. Normally Beth hides her binges; to dine with her one would never guess how she manages to pack in and maintain the 200 or so pounds she carries on her short frame. But we have enough history that she’s not ashamed to let me see her at it, and that weekend she went for it. Sam was with her most of the way, and I kept up with them at times: nuts, chips, candy, ice cream, cake and pie, frozen fried shrimp, pizza rolls and pizza and taquitos and fries and onion rings and then a start-over, always careful to alternate the salty with the sweet with the fat so we only had to stop when we slept.

Sam and I did a bit of clambering around the rocks and near tide pools but Beth didn’t join us for that. The fact is she’s not very limber. It’s been a long time since Beth could pick something up off the floor without holding onto a door frame and counterbalancing by sending a leg up behind her. She really wasn’t fit enough to make it down the rocky path to the water, let alone back up. So Sam and I had some brief excursions with the dogs while Beth read People and fashion magazines in their room. Sam talked then about their plans to go on a diet together – he had a business trip to Hawaii coming up in a few months, and he knew Beth would find a way to duck it unless she could get into a bathing suit – and I think I was very restrained, not letting him see on my face how hopeless I thought it would be, unless they started to get some sort of regular exercise. I’ve told him before that it’s not the calories activity burns; it’s the mind-set toward health that’s the charm. But I kept my mouth shut. I’ve finally learned not to beat that poor dead horse.

My weak spot, apparently, is an Achilles tendon.

Not that my mother was a demi-goddess, except perhaps in her mind and my father’s (at least at first). Not that I was ever dipped. I’m Jewish. Jewish babies are not dipped.

I was supposed to be sweet and precious but I grew big feet and thick ankles, big face and stubborn brain. “Simplicity is class,” my father said when he gave me a single cultured pearl on a thin gold chain, but delicate jewelry was lost on my frame. I thought delicacy and subtlety, and even class, were wasted on me.

I grew thick ankles, and I consoled myself with the idea that they would never turn on me.

Hah!

It’s true I don’t sprain them. You never see me on crutches after some city stumble. But I who ice skated at age seven on the sidewalks of my Long Island neighborhood was quite surprised, in a disappointed way, when the family rented skates in Blue Jay, California, when I was 14, and I discovered that I couldn’t keep the blades beneath me. My ankles just weren’t strong enough. I didn’t try to ice skate after that.

Four decades passed. After three of them, I forsook my sedentary ways and discovered the joy of physical activity. I learned that body work is mind work; I am in fact connected through the isthmus of my neck. It came to pass that I thought I was fit.

Hah!

Two years ago my brother and sister-in-law and I, with our three dogs, rented an SUV and made a long-weekend trip to Mendocino.

We’d traveled together before, and well, but then events occurred that strained the relationship between Beth and me. I had introduced her to my brother – we’d been work colleagues and friends when she made a serious suicide attempt, and ended up living for a month with me and my then-husband because her mother was too busy (narcissistic, childish, creepy) to take care of her. That’s when Beth met Sam; that’s how Beth became my sister-in-law.

We continued working together after they married – she had such a toxic relationship with her mother that Beth decided not to have kids of her own and so she never interrupted her career with a pregnancy. Soon we moved together from the consulting office where we met to the new firm which I established, and a year after that I gave her some stock. I thought that would make her act like an owner, hoist her out of the supportive secretarial role she’d filled for so long, because I hadn’t yet realized that ownership has nothing to do with a certificate. And when she quit the job, a year before the Mendocino trip, five years after the stock award, in the throes of another bout of clinical depression that she chose to blame on me (I didn’t show her enough appreciation), she harassed me for buyout money, funds I didn’t have because I’d instead always paid her more than her job was worth, and our relationship ruptured every way it could.

Poor Sam. My baby brother has always been driven to try to make people happy. He frets about facial expressions; he apologizes for heavy traffic and bad weather. He couldn’t stand Beth’s complaints about me and he hated to hear my bitter comments. He kept trying to make it right.

He suggested several vacations before this one took. I was always agreeable as long as I didn’t have to leave my dog. Corky was beyond normal large-breed life expectancy, allergic to dozens of irritants and plagued with some other imperfections too, but she was my sole mammalian companion, the dog with whom I’d lived longest, and I was determined to continue to take care of her. I’d decided when she was one year old and began to present her medical problems that I’d do whatever was necessary. I like to think that when I take on a dependent it’s for the full ride.

No, till then Beth had been the balker. She wouldn’t agree to go anywhere warm, lest she have to reveal her body (Beth is obese and ashamed of it. She tries to hide her girth in tunics and shapeless dresses, apparently oblivious to the fact that her five-foot height and humongous tits tell the story no matter how she is appareled). Or circumstances in her new job made it impossible to leave. Or she let plans proceed to a week before departure and then got too ill to go.

“You may be right,” Paula said. She took a few paces in silence and added, “When you think about everything a person has to learn from birth to adulthood, it’s a miracle if the kid has any good days at all.”

“That and the days are so long,” I agreed. “It’s enough to make me distrust all recollection, any history reports. I want to think more on it.” But Paula changed the subject. She said:

“I can’t believe Peg got the contract with the county.”

“You mean, after the reference you wrote?”

“Yeah.” Paula even kicked a little trail dust as she exhaled that syllable. Peg is a therapist, and she listed Paula as a reference when she applied to the county for a position in mental health. Paula had referred several patients to Peg in the past, and the referrals didn’t work. The patients had let Peg go gently – so gently that Peg managed to interpret the experience in a light quite favorable to herself. She hadn’t learned that it wasn’t okay to take sudden vacations from her practice. She didn’t get it that she shouldn’t argue with her patients about their feelings. “It wasn’t an easy letter to write,” Paula continued, “but I was very clear. I told them that she’s impatient and rigid. That she tends not to let her patients have their feelings. I even said I thought she could be dangerous in the position. I can’t believe they gave her the job.”

“Maybe they didn’t have many applicants? Maybe, even though she isn’t great, she was the best they got?”

“I don’t know…” Paula said with uncertainty. It had been very difficult for her to write those things about Peg. And then to have her hard words ignored…

Peg didn’t do any walking that day. We saw her at lunch (I underate again, with consequent overconsumption of chocolate later), but she felt that at least on her first day of recovery, she shouldn’t be walking at all. She’d enjoyed getting to know Jack during the morning; she was disappointed to learn the guys switched off, and Kurt would drive the afternoon leg. But then Paula discovered that lunch disagreed with her (so maybe it was lucky I underate after all), and opted to ride with Peg, and I ended up chatting all afternoon with Jack who led us hikers.

The first half hour the trail was too narrow for two abreast, and I hiked behind Jack’s long legs and high butt. I liked the look of his wavy gray hair and his natural good posture. His stride was quite sexy. So I was disposed to enjoy his conversation by the time the trail widened and we spoke.

“Isn’t that redwood sorrel?” I asked him and pointed at the big clover-like stuff under the trailside ferns.

“It is,” he replied in a pleasant deep voice, and he slowed his pace a little.

“Then why isn’t is purple underneath?” I knew the plant. I first met it on a visit to Redwoods National Park, and I liked it. Its underside is usually purple, and it turns the underside up when it’s had enough sun for the day. But this stuff wasn’t purple anywhere.

“Wow,” Jack said as he stopped and examined a dozen or so sprouts of sorrel. “You’re right. I’m sure it’s redwood sorrel but I’ve never seen it before without purple. Hmmm….maybe it’s too early in the season? Maybe it purples later, like in August, when the sun is stronger…” He looked directly at me then, blue-eyed and smiling. Our glances connected.

Dinner that night was weird. Peg wanted to talk first about her new contract with the county, which made Paula uncomfortable, and then about her attraction to Jack, which wasn’t fun for me. She went on at length about their morning flirtation. She kept tossing her hair around and looking vivaciously for him in the dining room, but he hadn’t arrived yet. I told her I’d enjoyed the afternoon with him and she asked me if he’d mentioned her. I said no: that mostly we’d talked about past camping experiences and bike vacations.

“Yeah, he mentioned he likes to travel by bike. Well, that’ll have to go if we get together. That’s one mode of travel I won’t do.” That’s just like Peg, already unconsidering his words. I watched her scrape her french bread across the top of the butter tub, and I felt superior for eating my bread dry.

We got Peg off the Jack subject by talking about Paula’s son. David had been a challenge to his mother since he hit adolescence, and that was 15 years ago. Lately, on top of everything else, he’d taken to verbally abusing her over the telephone. Usually she would initiate the call, and most of the time the conversation would quickly degenerate into an epithet-filled tirade from him. The night before we all left on the tour, Paula called David to say goodbye, and he didn’t even wish her a good trip. He was too busy telling her what a bad mother she’d been, how because she didn’t make him study piano from the age of three he couldn’t be a music phenomenon now, how if she hadn’t been so busy working (to support him! after his flaky father disappeared and before husband three came along) he would have grown up strong and right.

“Stop!” Peg put her hand up as she issued the order. “I can’t stand this. Do you realize what you were doing? Do you realize you were voluntarily holding the telephone headset to your ear so that your son could deliver these pearls of poison into you? Hello?”
I looked at Paula at that moment and saw that she was getting it. We all were. Realizing how often we do the equivalent of willingly holding the phone to the ear, the hand to the fire…

“I guess we always have the option of refusing to play,” Paula said quietly.

“A quiet refusal, a gentle goodbye,” I added. Right then, I was proud of all three of us.

The next moment, Jack walked into the room. Peg was still shining-eyed with wisdom, and she greeted him eagerly. In a way it hurt to watch him watch me instead. A very small way. Paula and Peg are both blonde and slim, and Peg has big breasts. But everybody’s got a sissymaker.

Peg was not hurt, but she’s a complainer. For the rest of the morning hike we had to hear about the chances of delayed symptoms of injury. And although it’s true that after that event, Peg didn’t walk the long option on any other days of the trip, it wasn’t that slide that held her back. Even though the trip information listed extra hiking shoes as a must-have item, even though Paula and I strongly seconded that recommendation, Peg insisted that her one pair of Timberlands would be enough. Her suitcase wouldn’t hold more, and there was no way our stylish friend was going to fly anywhere in hiking boots. The blisters that she started growing on day one ripened by day two, just in time for the mud hike. It may even be that she slid because her foot was hurting and made her step abnormally. Anyway, even with rest and moleskin, Peg didn’t do much hiking after that. Instead she got to know whichever of our tour guides was driving the shuttle. Quality time with Jack or Kurt.

For the remainder of that slippery hike, Paula and I tended to Peg. I tried to look at tree leaves, but I kept returning to thoughts of gender. Reading tree leaves. Remembering how amazed/dismayed I was at how differently people treated my brother and me. We were much alike. Except I was older and smarter and stronger than he. My brother was a really nice kid, but I had more spirit and drive. The only other difference then was between our legs. Our sissymakers. Mom did not teach us different words for our genitals. We both had sissymakers. Through them we made siss. Now, I’ll admit “siss” is onomatopoetic, but I have no idea why our mother decided to depart from convention and consequently (of course) lead us to embarrassment out here in the real world, where people say “piss.” Mom called shit “doody,” or maybe it was “duty,” for “doing your duty;” she never spelled it for us. To poop, in my family of origin, was to fart. Go figure it.

My brother and I both had sissymakers, which looked different but did the same thing. Yet my parents and their friends expected me to be afraid of insects and him to hate dolls. It was assumed that I would be interested in the kitchen talk: babies and food and disease. Actually I wanted the livingroom politics, and I lurked there. My brother was always interested in cooking; it would have been much more appropriate to give him all that kitchen time.

Looking back on it all, it’s no surprise to me that I wanted to be a boy, a lad, a young man. The surprise is that I changed my mind and decided to be a woman. That’s where I got to in my meditations that morning; we reached the crest of our hike and stopped for lunch. I tried to eat light and healthy and I probably overdid my moderation. After all, I was on a walking tour and burning calories; I’m sure I would have felt better and enjoyed it more if I’d just relaxed and let myself go. Story of my life… After lunch we put Peg in the van and Paula and I hiked together.

“I read a book recently and the author kept saying that sycamore leaves are hand-shaped, and sycamore trunks are white,” I commented. “Do you think she was talking about another variety of sycamore? ‘Cause look at these: their trunks are putty-colored. And the leaves aren’t nearly as hand-shaped as maples…” Paula had gotten into botanical and avian identification after marrying her fourth husband; it was something they could share. But she didn’t know any more about sycamores than I.

“I always thought liquidambar leaves looked the most like hands,” Paula answered.

“Oh, no. Not hands. Starfish. Or sailboats after they’ve fallen onto the wet sidewalks: one of their points always upwards like a mast…”

She smiled at me as she imagined that. “We never had liquidambar trees where I grew up.”

“We neither. But we had lots of maples. Remember playing with the polynoses?”

“The seed pods? Yeah…gee: I’d completely forgotten about those… how the hell do you remember all this stuff?”

“I can’t help myself. I don’t know how not to remember. What boggles me is how most everyone else seems to have forgotten.”

“It’s not like you had a really great or really bad childhood, which would – you know – tend to fix things in your memory…”

I said, “I was bored, I was frustrated, and my parents loved me. I wanted every day to count, and I couldn’t stand how much of my time was wasted doing things I didn’t want to do. I couldn’t wait to grow up and have power.

“I knew a lot of other kids, and they didn’t seem substantially happier than I was. Yet all the adults I know now seem to recall these happy childhoods that they want to replicate for their kids. Frankly, I don’t believe I just happened to grow up with the one set of unhappy suburban kids in America. I think my current pals are misremembering.”

“Once upon a time a child was born. Me. Upon a 1950 time. In New York City.

“I was one of thousands of children born that day. One of hundreds in New York. One of dozens in that hospital. One of several that morning. One of three girls. The only Erica. The only Erica Tucker Washburn. The only child of my parents.

“I didn’t have longer eyelashes than the boy babies. My breasts were no bigger than any other infant’s. The world would learn a lot about sex and chromosomes in the coming decades, and even more about gender and hormones, but none of that was how they determined that the Washburn baby was female. While Eric Washburn sat anxiously in the waiting room, while Ruth Washburn neé Tucker strained and clenched and bore down half-effectively through drugs, the obstetrician cupped my slick head and supported my tiny shoulders with his fingertips and, distinguishing the emergent labia from a scrotum, announced bassily, ‘It’s a girl!’” After saying that I tripped on a tree root, which took some polish off my narration, but my friends were too kind to mock me. The trail was wide enough so we could walk side by side, a little out of breath with the slight hill, and I kept talking.

“A girl. My parents were calling me ‘It’ll’ by the end of the pregnancy. Taken from comments like ‘It’ll be a good sleeper’ or ‘It’ll be a wrestler,’ depending on whether fetal I was quiet or active. The name had grown to ‘Little It’ll’ by the date of actual birth. It was astounding how soon that was replaced by pronouns.

“I was my father’s little princess. I became my mother’s animate toy. All of the baby gifts were pink, frilly and coordinated; little Erica was daily dressed in a precious ensemble. I didn’t have much hair at first. Even with all the pink some strangers thought I was a boy. My parents were adamant and immediate about correcting that assumption. ‘She’s a girl,’ Ruth would inform the erroneous. To ‘What a darling little boy’ Eric would rebut, ‘Girl. Girl. This is my daughter.’ They were acutely bothered when folks got it wrong.”

“You can’t possibly remember all of this,” Peg said in a tone a bit scornful. Peg is abrupt and impatient; she often seems scornful when she’s just being brusque. Paula is slower and more gentle, and made one of her little hums as we three kept hiking.

“Of course I don’t remember this part,” I countered. “But I have some vivid recollections from about age two to five, and stories from my parents, and I’ve extrapolated backwards.”

Peg persisted. “ I can’t believe you can remember that young,” although she wasn’t doubting my honesty. “I don’t think I have more than three memories from before high school.”

I do. I remember. I think it’s what helps me change.

I don’t have many clothes, but what I have range in size from 6 to 14. I’ve been 5’7″ for the last 35 years, but my weight has been every number from 140 to 190. My hair is usually curly, most often short, and may be any color from its natural salt-and-pepper to whatever shade my conservative colorist selects. I have a lot of looks.

Then, for example, I weighed 175. I’d picked up some stressy pounds. I was wearing my hair dark auburn, about chin length, with enough products on it that it fell in waves and ringlets instead of bushing out in frizz. But six months before I’d weighed 155 and had darker shorter hair, showed my belly more, walked younger. That felt better. I was turning the vector around…unh…aw but it’s unwieldy…inert…unh…there!

I’m a (shape)changer but no mistress of disguise. No quick-change artist, me. It takes me awhile to translate me. But I do it all the time.

I was into it then, among the curly-edged spear-leaves of pittosporum, amid the coin-leaves of a big oak, while the white sky peeked through at my effort. I was changing while hiking. On tour.

Not so my friends Peg and Paula. Each keeps coloring her hair the same shade of blonde, wearing the same professional garb, marrying the same type of man, longing nostalgically (gaack!) for romance (oh lordy…)

You may wonder why I’m friends with them, thinking of them as above. The answer is they’re nice women (Paula is, anyway), and being with them sometimes is better than being alone. They’re not always boring.

The thing about Peg and Paula that amazes me most is they have no memories. They don’t remember their childhoods, or how they felt about sex when they were 12, or when they stopped loving their husbands.

Then I said, “I’m telling you: I have some memories from before my brother was born – from before age three – and I know they’re real because they were too mundane for my folks to make photographs or reminiscences. And I very much remember events from age five and six, when I first noticed gender bias.”

My oration was mud-interrupted. The grade we walked had become steeper and wetter, and the ground had enough clay to be slick, enough ruts to be muddy. Peg’s foot slipped and she went down on her left knee. Paula tried to keep her upright and got a wrenched arm for her attempt. I was a bit ahead of them; I stopped talking and turned to see Peg kneeling on her left knee and Paula standing by her with a hand near Peg’s shoulder. I stepped back to them, slid a little myself, and helped Paula pull Peg upright.